JACK BATTEN
The House of Ashes By Stuart Neville Soho Crime, 304 pages, $35.95
Stuart Neville’s new crime novel leaves the impression that, in the matter of men’s abuse of women, Northern Ireland operates on a particularly hideous level. Until now, Neville has been known for his beautifully written Northern Irish noir. But with “The House of Ashes,” while the writing is still beautiful, Neville’s subject is men’s mistreatment of women — including murder — and women who find the courage to stand up. The horrific abuses cover two intersecting time periods when struggles over money and property define relationships. Readers may be tempted to skim over the grim descriptions but, no matter what the reaction, Neville offers a remarkable, if troubling, work about resilience and justice.
An Image in the Lake By Gail Bowen ECW, 450 pages, $34.95
This may be Gail Bowen’s most comprehensive novel in her Joanne Kilbourn series, now up to 20 books. The new novel runs to 450 pages, brings 28 characters into play (plus dogs), and ranges all over Regina and the surrounding countryside. A couple of suspicious deaths figure into the plot, but Joanne isn’t much called on to apply her sleuthing skills. A more insistent theme centres on Joanne’s revisiting of nastiness directed her way in the past. There’s the matter of Jill for one shocking instance. She’s the former best friend who carried on a long, super-secret affair with Joanne’s first husband, which Joanne learned about only after the rat of a husband died. Jill returns in a big way in the new book, and the question for us readers is how will Joanne and her kids react? The book is heavy on domestic subplots of this nature and, needless to say, the stories make for juicy material.
Denial By Beverley McLachlin Simon & Schuster, 375 pages, $24
Just because Beverley McLachlin sat as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada for 17 years doesn’t mean that, in her crime fiction, she can’t fool around outrageously with Canada’s trial system. That’s what she does when it’s crunch time in her twisty new novel set in Vancouver. The craziness begins when Vera Quentin is charged with murdering her wealthy and ailing mother by injecting her with a lethal shot of morphine. The heroine of the piece, ace defence counsel Jilly Truitt, takes the case at trial where she finds that the chief witness for the prosecution is Vera’s supposedly loving husband, Joseph, himself a wizard of the B.C. defence bar. If this plot setup seems to be pushing at the edges of believability, McLachlin’s only just beginning in a story that’s heavy on red herrings, rugs pulled from under readers’ feet and other mainstays of the conventional sleuthing game.
Never Saw Me Coming By Vera Kurian Park Row Books, 392 pages, $34.99
The setting is a high-powered Washington D.C., university. The school’s psychology department is beginning the new academic year with something a little edgy by admitting seven students who have been diagnosed as psychopaths. The seven are smart, presentable, and have access in one way or another to money. They also have a background of serious criminal activity. The psychology department’s shrinks think they can fix all the problems. Little do they know. In no time, two of the seven psychopaths are murdered and another of the seven reveals that she’s on a mission to bump off a senior student who raped her years earlier. The big surprise is that all of the twisty stuff — there’s plenty more — comes across as believable enough to persuade readers to hang in for resolution to the astounding intricacies.